Posts Tagged ‘Donna George Storey’

Some Dirty Girls reading snapshots by Marlo Gayle (see full set on Flickr). Many thanks to all the wonderful readers, Les of Cafe Royale for hosting, Red Stripe for sponsoring, the people with the free chutney samples (sorry, don’t have their company name in front of me) and Andie East of Seal Press for being an awesome publicist and coming to my rescue with books. The reading went really well and it was wonderful to see so many familiar faces in the audience.

And is it me or is it kindof juvenile for the chutney person to have done the rabbit ears in this photo?

It seems only fitting after posting the interview with Donna George Storey about her story “To Dance at the Fair” from Dirty Girls and Sally Rand to offer up an excerpt. This is the start of her story and the rest of it just gets (much) hotter from there…

Naked

Whenever I stand up to speak before an audienceæbe it a ballroom full of steely-eyed colleagues or the semester’s first class of yawning kidsæI think of Sally and I feel strong.

You might say I have it backwards, that I’m supposed to imagine my audience naked to give myself courage, not the other way around. Because of course, Sally Rand, the sensation of Chicago’s Century-of-Progress Exposition during the dark Depression years of 1933 and 1934, stepped onto the stage wearing nothing but two ostrich feather fans and a dusting of pure white powder. As the dance progressed she would swirl her fans, teasing the audience with a flash of nipple or a glimpse of buttock, until, at long last, she would spread her wings to reveal everything. And then, in a flash of light, she was gone, before anyone could really knowæhad they really seen Sally nude or was it all an illusion?

This afternoon it was especially fitting to conjure Sally’s ghost as I took the podium. I was giving a paper on her and her sister performers entitled, “’Enough Nudity for Anyone’s 15 Cents’: Sally Rand, the Crystal Lassies, and the Roots of Internet Porn at the Century-of-Progress Expositions.” I brought plenty of slides, and the ballroom was packed. Sally has been dead for more than twenty years, but she still knows how to pull them in.

Novice that I was to burlesque, I was lucky not to be facing my audience alone. On my left was a dark and very handsome man named Mario Carbone. He had written a paper on “primitive cultures” exhibits and fantasies of empire specifically to join me on this panel. The lean, fair-haired man to my right with the intriguing air of melancholy was Christopher Hansen. For my benefit, he had tweaked his customary focus on FDR into a discussion of the perfect marriage of corporate capitalism and the New Deal at the interwar fairs.

Although we now teach in different parts of the country, the three of us have been best friends since the first week of grad school. Our professors dubbed us the inseparable threesome, and the other students openly laid bets on who got to be in the middle during our all-night fuck fests.
Mario, Chris and I laughed it off because we were sure our bond was purely platonic, founded on mutual intellectual admiration. We wouldn’t be honest enough with ourselves to go to bed together for another fifteen years.

Donna is one of our readers at this Monday, April 28th’s FREE book party/reading for Dirty Girls at Cafe Royale, 800 Post Street at Leavenworth, San Francisco. There will even be free cupcakes! Join us and hear Donna read from “To Dance at the Fair.” She is also one of my favorite erotica wriers and I’m thrilled every time she submits a story to me. I first discovered her writing when we were both contributors to Susie Bright’s Best American Erotica 2006 and have been a fan ever since. Also, lucky us, she is joining us at In The Flesh Erotic Reading Series this fall, so stay tuned!

Donna George Storey’s erotic fiction has appeared in She’s On Top; He’s On Top; E is for Exotic; Love at First Sting; Garden of the Perverse: Fairy Tales for Twisted Adults; Sexiest Soles; Taboo: Forbidden Fantasies for Couples; Best American Erotica 2006; Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 4, 5, and 6; and Best Women’s Erotica 2005, 2006, and 2007. Her novel set in Japan, Amorous Woman, is part of Orion’s Neon erotica series. Read more of her work at www.DonnaGeorgeStorey.com.

Tell us a little about yourself, aside from what’s in your official bio.

When people who don’t know me well find out I write erotica, they’re always very surprised, because I’m pretty much your mom-next-door type. Those who’ve known me from my wild youth, before I wrote “adult” stories, wonder why it took me so long to embrace my true calling. In college, I was famous for impromptu recitations of my poems in rhyming couplets, with such titles as “Sperm” and “The Man from Japan” (Copies, and recitations, available on request).

My blog is called “Sex, Food and Writing” and if you add “Travel” to that, you’ve pretty much covered the things I like to do best. I love to cook, either healthy stews and soups based on the contents of my weekly CSA box of organic veggies, or decadent multi-layered cookies and creamy puddings. I like to dabble in exotic cuisines—Japanese, Indian, Russian. It’s like taking a little trip abroad when I can’t afford the ticket.

Like Elizabeth in “To Dance at the Fair,” I spent some time in academia, although my specialty was Japanese literature. Japan is the setting for my first novel, Amorous Woman, the story of an American woman’s love affair with Japan. It’s not a memoir, but it could be. By the way, I just got back from a trip to Japan a few weeks ago, to see the cherries in full blossom. Twenty-four years after we first met, I’m still in love!

What inspired your story “To Dance at the Fair?” What message do you hope readers take away from it?

We were visiting my husband’s family in the Midwest and stopped by the Chicago Historical Society where I bought a book about the Century of Progress World’s Fair of 1933-34. The fair was supposed to celebrate all kinds of stuffy civic achievements, but the real draw was Sally Rand and her sexy fan dance. I’ve always been fascinated by sex in earlier times because it was secret, forbidden territory. Sally’s popularity seemed like a doorway into that hidden part of history.

The other inspiration is more of a reaction to the typical portrayal of group sex in a lot of sexually explicit writing. Everything goes so smoothly: double the partners, double the fun. But the reality, at least in my limited experience, is more complex. I wanted to capture that in a story.

The message I’d like to convey? I hope there are many but the main one would be that we all come to bed with a complex set of fantasies, a private and collective past. But not to worry. It is “baggage,” but it can make the pleasure all the richer.

Did you have to do any research to write the story? Is your character Sally Rand based on a real person?

Sally is very real—here’s a photo of her with her fans shielding the naughty bits. She continued to dance for decades after the fair. I recently read a memoir about a very proper WASP family where the parents’ first date was a visit to a club to watch Sally Rand perform in the early 1960s.

The research for the story was fascinating. I found a copy of Sally’s Tru-Vue photo poster in a World’s Fair collectibles book—the original sells for over $2000. There’s a great interview with her in Studs Terkel’s Hard Times where her courage and her sympathy for the working man and woman shine through. I really grew to admire her. She’s definitely a dirty girl in the best sense of the word.

Your story is about a woman who takes inspiration from one of her gutsy, sexy foremothers. Who do you take artistic (and/or sexual) inspiration from?

In keeping with the historical theme, I’ll mention some of my earliest inspirations (the list of women erotica writers I turn today for inspiration is too long—just check the table of contents of Dirty Girls!). First there’s the Japanese poet Yosano Akiko, who shocked the world with her suggestive love poetry in the early 1900s. From her I learned a writer can be erotic and elegant. Colette and Anais Nin taught me similar lessons. I love Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie—funny, irreverent, sexy and tragic. One book can have it all. That’s what I strive for in my work—maybe some day!

In the story, you say, “The stripper and the school marm. On the surface, it would be hard to find two women more different than Sally and me.” Do you feel that women are pitted against each other and made to seem more different, sexually and otherwise, than we really are?

Absolutely. Since time immemorial men have used the “divide and conquer” method to limit women’s influence over them. Virgins to the right, whores to the left. That’s because they knew if one woman possessed the power of both, she’d be unstoppable. I think this is still in play today where our culture does its best to insist smart women can’t be sexy. Or sexy women smart. The stories in Dirty Girls are proof this isn’t so!

What’s your general erotica-writing process like? Do you write on a set schedule or when you’re inspired?

I try to write almost every morning when my kids are at school, inspired or not. I may not be particularly productive every day, but I’ve found that the flashes of magic don’t come unless I’m ready at the keyboard. But I am always looking for ideas for new stories and they come at the most unlikely times—like when I’m browsing in a museum bookstore. One tendency I’ve noticed is that I’m drawn to topics that seem a little weird, uncanny, inexplicable. For example, “To Dance at the Fair” is an attempt to make sense of the strange phenomenon of all of Chicago using the World’s Fair as an excuse to see a stripper, randy young bucks and respectable, if daring, matrons alike.

What do you think makes a good erotica story work?

A good dirty story needs all the elements a “clean” story requires—conflict, intriguing characters, a fresh use of language. But erotica writers face an additional challenge in that the reader expects to be turned on as well. Just as we all have our different sexual preferences, I don’t think any one erotic story can speak to everyone’s deepest desires, but I’d say the best examples have the power to draw you into their worlds, to seduce you, no matter if the acts involved aren’t your cup of tea in the real world.

I’ll add a personal note here—I know that fantasy and sexuality are intimately related, but nothing excites me more than an erotic story that embraces the truth of human sexuality. If a character comes five times during a five-minute fuck, I’m just too busy rolling my eyes to get turned on. If I feel like I’ve learned something about the mysteries of sex from a story, if a thought or a feeling I couldn’t quite pin down has been articulated eloquently, the author has me on my knees, panting with desire.

What are you working on next?

I’m ready—any day now—to start writing my second novel, an edgy erotic romance that is a peek through the bedroom keyhole of American history in the 20th century. Sally Rand will probably make an appearance, along with Bettie Page and camera clubs in the 1950s, John Updike’s spouse-swapping suburbia and lots more. The research for this one should be fun, too. I am glad to have found work I love.

As a little treat, here’s a video from YouTube of Sally Rand performing at the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair:

"Bussel has done some of her best editorial work with Dirty Girls: Erotica for Women. Each and every one of the book's 394 pages shows she knows what girls like--and you're fortunate that she does." -- Baltimore City Paper

Even though we usually tend to prefer our books short and sweet—who doesn't like a good quickie?—we can't deny that this book is well worth a read: from girls who like to take to stories of girls who like to be taken; girls who like girls, girls who like boys, and girls who like both; waitresses, dommes, college professors, college students ... well, you can probably figure out that there's something for everyone in this collection. (And don't be discouraged by that "erotica for women" tagline: it may be made for a woman, but we promise it's hot enough for a man as well. -- Fleshbot